Have you ever had that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that a small disaster is imminent?
The dream is real. I woke in a sweat the other night. A consistent dream of incompetence haunts my sleep now and again. I am playing golf on a bright and sunny day. The course is crowded with foursomes and play is clipping along at a good pace. That is until my ball comes to rest in the worst of stony brambles. It’s lodged among rocks and roots and there is no way I can get a club head on the ball. If it was not a dream, I would call an “unplayable lie”, determine the correct direction and distance of two club lengths, drop the ball, and play on. Except this is a dream. I can’t find my bag! Where are my clubs? My playing partners have moved on to the next hole! Now, I can’t find my ball! Everything unravels until I have shrunk from my six feet to about four foot two inches in height with clubs that are too long, a ball that is all but invisible, and stress that would crush a submarine’s hull. Ineptitude, incompetence, lack of confidence, lack of knowledge and skill, and unrelenting surrounding conditions that demand immediate forward progress – these are the makings of my bad dreams. But, it is only a dream about golf!
If I was still a practicing teacher or principal or school superintendent, my nightmare would not be about golf. It would be about the looming mandate that all children in Wisconsin will be instructed in the English/language arts and mathematics Common Core State Standards and a new statewide assessment will be used to not only grade each child’s achievement, but each teacher’s and each principal’s professional effectiveness. Egads!
Crunch time is now. In 2010 the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction adopted the Common Core Standards as part of the Department’s application for a waiver from the mounting tensions of the No Child Left Behind Act. http://standards.dpi.wi.gov/stn_ccss Nationally, most states were floundering in their efforts to meet the escalating performance demands of NCLB. Without relief, many states would have been declared educationally bankrupt. As a result, US Department of Education Secretary Duncan encouraged states to seek a waiver from NCLB. There were many required puzzle pieces that states were required to adopt in order to secure USDE approval of their NCLB waiver. Adoption of rigorous academic standards at each grade level with a more accountable assessment system and reformed measures for assessing teacher effectiveness were just three of the puzzle pieces. Now, meeting these reform mandates has the same feeling as the NCLB requirements that were waived.
2010-11 was a year for teachers to understand the scope of the challenge. 2011-12 was committed to professional development of local curriculum and alignment of curricular resources in units of instruction that would cause students to learn the objectives of the CCSS. 2012-13 and 2013-14 are committed to developing activity (lesson) plans that integrate the instruction/learning of multi-CCSS objectives so that children can accomplish the demands of real world, complex assessment problems. Gone are the old-school multiple choice and true-false exams that teachers used for generations. Here are multi-part problems that require comprehension, analysis and evaluation of several sources of data, collaboration with other students, integration of technology, and reporting of conclusions in an information-style essay.
Wow! Put my golf ball back among the rocks and roots. I would rather play from there.
2014-15 is show time! Children will take their new, problem-rich state tests and conclusions will begin to form regarding the progress of each child’s academic achievement and the effectiveness of each local school and faculty. America loves to keep score and the news media will be waist deep in numbers to report.
Egads! Hear the voices of golfers, now teachers, caught in the brambles of their classrooms questioning their competence, knowledge and skills? A study by the Editorial Projects in Education (Education Week) indicates that almost 50 percent of surveyed teachers feel unprepared to teach the CCSS English/language arts and math standards as of March, 2013. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/02/27/22common_ep.h32.html One of the new wrinkles is that ALL children, advantaged as well as disadvantaged, English speaking as well as non-English speaking, regular education as well as special education, are required to learn the same standards and take the same problem-rich assessment. This is the conundrum that many teachers voiced in the survey; teach all students the same standards and assess all students using the same test. This really is different than it used to be. Egads! no longer is a strong enough exclamation of exasperation.
Interestingly, if education was any other national industry, training the industry’s labor force would be quite different. Boeing trains a required number of workers to understand the design of the new Dreamliner and once they understand, they to begin construction of a Dreamliner. They do not construct 767s while they train. They are relieved of prior work to learn how to do new work. General Motors, Honda and BMW shut down production lines while they retool for a next year’s model. Employees are trained in the new line of autos, not while they are making last year’s model, but while they concentrate on the new line.
Teachers will teach children every school day in 2012-13. They are given professional training on the CCSS after school or on half-days when they must prepare for their substitute teacher and often reteach that half-day’s instruction the next day. The 2012-13 production line of child learning does not stop for teachers to learn the demands of the new production line. And, in Wisconsin, the politics of education continue with new options for parents to choose schools for their children where academic achievement may provide their child an advantage for life. This year’s test scores and school report card scores have ever-increasing meaning for a teacher straddling the 2012-13 curriculum while trying to learn the 2014-15 assessment requirements for instruction in 2013-14. Do well today or lose students tomorrow. This is the way it is. Sounds crazy, but egads! this is a Wisconsin teacher’s reality. And, this is why so many teachers declared that they were not prepared for the CCSS in the Education Week survey.
So, what to do. First, if NCLB was Leave No Child Behind, CCSS should include a corollary of Leave No Teacher Behind and Leave No Teacher Alone. We have too many schools with one, two or three teachers of the same grade level or subject. This is not a large enough work group to get this essential work completed. It is time to cross district lines and combine forces for professional development. Groups of 8 – 10 teachers with a common assignment should be gathered during significant released time to formulate new and innovative instruction of blended CCSS objectives. Combine faculties from different schools. Combine teachers from different school districts. There are no Lone Rangers in preparing for the CCSS.
Second, significant time is at least five days in a block of time several times each year when teachers are released from the demands of their respective classrooms. Education has a measly history of eeking out bits of time at the worst time of the day for teacher training. After school is bad because teachers are weary from a day’s work and this is when they need to be moving from employee to family member. Saturdays are bad because weekends are necessary family time. Time and timing are important and need to be treated as important. That is why released time is necessary.
Third, each group needs a trained trainer to assist them. Trainers can rotate from group to group within a county or CESA. However, every trainee group needs oversight and assistance. BMW does not send its middle management on vacation while workers retool. Everyone is committed to the new product. Superintendents, district office, principals, and all faculty no matter what they teach or do must be involved in retooling for a new instructional design.
Last, each group needs to see validated instructional units they can use as models. These exist. There should be no mystery as to what a quality activity plan looks like. BMW doesn’t tell employees who will make a Z4 roadster, “make it up as you go.” No one is interested in “cookie cutter” instruction, but knowing what cookies taste like helps us to create many variations on that successful taste.
Tempest fugit! Test results will be published in June, 2015. Now is the time to not only put the golf back into play but into a scoring position. Fore!